‘Put people in jail’: Former Fox reporter calls for arrests over right-wing’s great replacement theory

An ex-Fox News reporter says Joe Biden should be “taking some names and putting people in jail” over the right-wing’s great replacement theory.

Carl Cameron told MSNBC that he believes his former employer and star host Tucker Carlson participate in the same kind of dangerous rhetoric that reportedly inspired the mass shooting in Buffalo.

Ten people were killed and three wounded by a teenage gunman during the allegedly racially-motivated attack in the New York city over the weekend.

MSNBC’s Nicole Wallace asked Cameron, who was a chief political correspondent for Fox News until 2017, how “the ideology left in the mass shooter’s screed” seemed to echo that aired on Carlson’s show.

The New York Times, for instance, found that the primetime host’s top-watched political programme has addressed the issue of demographic “replacement”, in his own words, on hundreds of episodes totalling more than 50 hours of content.

The MSNBC host bluntly asked Cameron how Fox News reacted “When something like this happens?”

Cameron replied that he couldn’t “imagine” what was going through top executives’ minds and added that this sort of flare up was “partly why I ended up getting out of there”.

“It really is kind of horrible to think that journalists with national and international capacity are putting together this type of nonsense,” he explained.

“We got to watch out because the Republicans have become the purveyors of misinformation, and when our two-party system is broken like that, democracy is seriously in trouble,” he said, adding that the president needed to start “taking some names and putting people in jail”.

The great replacement theory, which has been cited as being partly what inspired the accused Buffalo mass shooter, is a racist theory that Democrats want to supplant white Americans with Hispanic voters and other immigrants of colour.

Cameron, though he didn’t explicitly state that he believed Carlson has directly quoted this theory on the show, but slammed him for hosting what he considers to be other dangerous lies and mistruths.

“I really can’t channel how Tucker believes in any of this stuff and how the network can go through with it,” he said. “I will say this, however, it is very clear that this type of lying and deception is catching on.”

When asked for comment, a spokesperson for Fox News pointedThe Independent to Mr Carlson’s on-air remarks denouncing violenace and political violence of any kind.

On the Monday night segment of his evening broadcast, Carlson acknowledged that the violent screed written by the accused Buffalo shooter was “definitely racist, bitterly so” and similarly condemned the violence.

He did, however, take issue with labelling the 180-page document written by shooting suspect Payton Gendron as a racist manifesto.

“Gendron reduces people to their skin colour and that’s the essence of racism and it’s immoral. But what he wrote does not add up to a manifesto,” he said, noting that it wasn’t “a blueprint for a new extremist political movement” but rather “a rambling pastiche of slogans and Internet memes, some of which flatly contradict one another”.

In recent days, a compilation of the Fox News host touting the ideas pushed by the great replacement theory has gone viral on social media.

“So I know that the left and all the little gatekeepers on Twitter become literally hysterical if you use the term ‘replacement’, if you suggest the Democratic Party is trying to replace the current electorate, the voters now casting ballots, with new people, more obedient voters from the third world,” Carlson begins the segment.

“But they become hysterical because that’s what’s happening actually. Let’s just say it. That’s true.”

Cameron’s remarks arrived just as Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer sent a letter to Fox News executives urging them to stop amplifying the “Great Replacement theory”, asking them to “cease and desist” with parroting the dangerous ideas on mainstream shows, such as Carlson’s.